| The Man without References by Becky Beasley |
“Will you tell me, Bartleby, where you were born?” “I would prefer not to.” “Will you tell me any thing about yourself?” “I would prefer not to.” |
What is it to be without references? Unemployable? Dangerous ? Perhaps no reference is better than a bad one? In Herman Melville’s short story, Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (1853), the reader is introduced to a man with neither references nor any desire for relation, but who nevertheless has a powerful effect on those around him. He appears without warning: ‘a motionless young man one morning, stood upon my office threshold’. He is ‘pallidly neat, pitiably respectable’. Bartleby’s appearance without context instantly unhinges normal procedures: he is employed without references. Time does not alter this lack of provenance. He works well, but with a disquieting reserve which throws into contrast the flurry of the office. It seems he hardly moves at all: |
‘I observed that he never went to dinner; indeed that he never went anywhere. As yet I had never of my personal knowledge known him to be outside of my office. He was a perpetual sentry in the corner.’ |
This immobility, however unsettling to the normal flux of the offices, takes on an oddly comforting, if two dimensional, aspect: |
‘As days passed on, I became considerably reconciled to Bartleby. His steadiness, his freedom from all dissipation, his incessant industry...his great stillness, his unalterableness of demeanor under all circumstances, made him a valuable acquisition. One prime thing was this,—he was always there;—first in the morning, continually through the day, and the last at night.' |
Nevertheless, this stasis gradually becomes a disturbance. Bartleby comes to be experienced as more a fixture than a man. He is hinged somewhere between architectural fitting, object and image. He is certainly present, it is his presence after all which causes the disturbance, but just as certainly not present in the way that others are. [...] |
| Becky Beasley is an artist and writer who lives in Berlin. She is represented by the Laura Bartlett Gallery in London and has exhibited widely in Europe since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2002. |
Excerpt from 'The Man without Reference' by Becky Beasley. All text © Becky Beasley 2007. Full Version can be read in the soon to be released Photography Class Catalogue. |